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1 Internet Censorship in the United Kingdom McIntyre, ‘Internet Censorship in the United Kingdom: National Schemes and European Norms’ in Edwards (ed), Law, Policy and the Internet (forthcoming Hart Publishing, 2018) Internet Censorship in the United Kingdom: National Schemes and European Norms TJ McIntyre1 This is a pre-print of a chapter to be published in Lilian Edwards (ed), Law, Policy and the Internet (forthcoming, Hart Publishing, 2018) Introduction The United Kingdom (UK) has been at the vanguard of online censorship in democracies from the beginning of the modern internet.2 Since the mid-1990s the government has developed distinctive patterns of regulation – targeting intermediaries, using the bully pulpit to promote ‘voluntary’ self- regulation, and promoting automated censorship tools such as web blocking – which have been influential internationally but raise significant issues of legitimacy, transparency and accountability.3 This chapter examines this UK experience in light of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and EU law, arguing that in key regards current censorship practices fail to meet European standards. There is already an extensive literature in this field: authors such as Akdeniz, Edwards, and Laidlaw have examined the fundamental rights implications of UK policy from a number of legal and regulatory perspectives.4 The current chapter builds on that work in two main ways. First, it assesses emerging censorship practices in the area of terrorist material and extreme pornography. Second, it considers how recent EU legislation and ECtHR case law might constrain the freedom of the UK government and force a move towards different models of censorship. The chapter starts by outlining the regulatory context. It then takes three case studies – Child Abuse Material (CAM), terrorist material, and pornography/extreme pornography under the Digital Economy Act 2017 – and traces how censorship has evolved from one context to the next. These systems are then evaluated against the standards set by Articles 6 and 10 ECHR, the Open Internet Regulation5 and 1 Lecturer in Law, University College Dublin. This chapter draws on material from ‘Internet blocking law and governance in the United Kingdom: an examination of the Cleanfeed system’ (University of Edinburgh, 2014) and ‘Content, control and cyberspace: The end of Internet regulatory forbearance in the United Kingdom?’, a paper presented at ‘Governance of New Technologies’, SCRIPT, Edinburgh, 29-31 March 2009. Disclosure: the author is chair of civil liberties group Digital Rights Ireland. 2 The term ‘censorship’ is a loaded one, but it is used here neutrally as a catch-all to describe state actions which aim to prevent the distribution or viewing of types of material. Censorship in this sense is narrower than ‘content regulation’ – it refers to schemes which aim to suppress certain material entirely, rather than merely regulating aspects such as how it is published, whether children can see it, or whether it meets the terms of use of a particular service. 3 See e.g. Ben Wagner, Global Free Expression - Governing the Boundaries of Internet Content, Law, Governance and Technology Series (Cham, 2016), chap. 4. 4 See e.g. Yaman Akdeniz, Internet Child Pornography and the Law: National and International Responses (Aldershot, 2008), chap. 9; Lilian Edwards, ‘Pornography, Censorship and the Internet’, in Law and the Internet, ed. by Lilian Edwards and Charlotte Waelde, 3rd edn (Oxford, 2009); Emily Laidlaw, ‘The Responsibilities of Free Speech Regulators: An Analysis of the Internet Watch Foundation’, International Journal of Law and Information Technology, 20/4 (2012), 312. 5 Regulation (EU) 2015/2120 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 November 2015 laying down measures concerning open internet access and amending Directive 2002/22/EC on universal service and users’ 1 McIntyre, ‘Internet Censorship in the United Kingdom: National Schemes and European Norms’ in Edwards (ed), Law, Policy and the Internet (forthcoming Hart Publishing, 2018) the Directives on Sexual Abuse of Children6 and on Combating Terrorism.7 The chapter concludes by considering what lessons we can learn from the UK experience. PART 1: UK CENSORSHIP SCHEMES 1. UK regulatory context UK government policy towards internet content has been very different from that applied to media such as television, cinema, and video games. In those areas the norm has been sector-specific legislation overseen by statutory regulators.8 For the internet, however, successive governments have opted for ‘legislative forbearance’: application of the general law rather than sector-specific legislation, overseen by industry self-regulation rather than statutory bodies.9 Until recently, internet content regulation in the UK has largely been carried out through a patchwork of government promoted self-regulatory systems. To summarise the most important examples: • The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has operated a notice and takedown system for CAM since 1996, a URL blocking list10 since 2004 and more recently a range of other responses including worldwide proactive searches11 and an image hash list12 to enable intermediaries to detect and block uploads of files. • Under the Mobile Operators’ Code of Practice, mobile operators have age-rated and blocked certain content accessed on mobile phones since 2004, using a framework developed by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC).13 • Since 2008 several filtering software companies have blocked webpages which police identify as illegally terror-related, under a confidential agreement with the Home Office.14 • Since 2010 the Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) has notified sites such as Facebook and YouTube of material which it deems to be illegally terror-related, for voluntary takedown as violating their terms of use.15 rights relating to electronic communications networks and services and Regulation (EU) No 531/2012 on roaming on public mobile communications networks within the Union. 6 Directive 2011/93/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 December 2011 on combating the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children and child pornography, and replacing Council Framework Decision 2004/68/JHA. 7 Directive (EU) 2017/541 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2017 on combating terrorism and replacing Council Framework Decision 2002/475/JHA and amending Council Decision 2005/671/JHA. 8 See e.g. Geoffrey Robertson and Andrew Nicol, Media Law, 4th edn (London, 2002), chap. 15 and 16. 9 David Currie, ‘The Ofcom Annual Lecture 2008’, 2008 <http://www.ofcom.org.uk/media/speeches/2008/10/annual_lecture> [accessed 21 January 2009]. 10 See e.g. T.J. McIntyre, ‘Child Abuse Images and Cleanfeeds: Assessing Internet Blocking Systems’, in Research Handbook on Governance of the Internet, ed. by Ian Brown (Cheltenham, 2013). 11 Tony Prosser, ‘United Kingdom: New Proactive Approach to Seek Out Child Pornography’, IRIS Legal Observations of the European Audiovisual Observatory, 2013 <http://merlin.obs.coe.int/iris/2013/8/article22.en.html> [accessed 21 July 2017]. 12 ‘Image Hash List’, IWF <https://www.iwf.org.uk/our-services/image-hash-list>. 13 Unless a subscriber verifies that they are an adult. See ‘Codes of Practice’, Mobile UK <http://www.mobileuk.org/codes-of-practice.html>; Christopher Marsden, Internet Co-Regulation: European Law, Regulatory Governance and Legitimacy in Cyberspace (Cambridge, 2011), 139–46. 14 Jane Fae, ‘The Internet Censorship Programme You’re Not Allowed to Know About’, politics.co.uk, 2014 <http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2014/03/27/the-internet-censorship-programme-you-re-not- allowed-to-know> [accessed 30 March 2016]. 15 ACPO, ‘CTIRU Factsheet’, 2010 <http://www.acpo.police.uk/documents/TAM/CTRIU%20factsheet.pdf> [accessed 10 March 2015]. 2 McIntyre, ‘Internet Censorship in the United Kingdom: National Schemes and European Norms’ in Edwards (ed), Law, Policy and the Internet (forthcoming Hart Publishing, 2018) • Since 2013 all major fixed line ISPs have presented subscribers with an ‘unavoidable choice’ whether to activate ‘family friendly filters’, blocking access to content unsuitable for children.16 The main providers of public wifi – covering over 90% of the market – have also agreed to impose these filters on all users of their public networks.17 • Since 2014 the .uk registry Nominet has policed new registrations to prevent use of domain names which appear to ‘promote sexual offences’.18 There has been little co-regulation or statutory regulation. The most significant is the regulation of on- demand audiovisual media services (‘TV-like’ services) by the Authority for Television on Demand (ATVOD) and Ofcom from 2009 onwards.19 It is telling that this was not a domestic initiative but was forced on a reluctant government by the Audiovisual Media Services Directive.20 As Petley notes, historically ‘British governments generally do not like to appear to be playing the censor and are far happier when they can instigate apparently “self-regulatory” systems in which they play a key role, albeit very much behind the scenes’.21 Why has self-regulation been so dominant? In part the UK is simply reflecting a global consensus on the expediency of this approach; in 2001 the Cabinet Office adopted the principle that internet self- regulation ‘generally provide[s] a more rapid and flexible means of responding to changing market needs, and achieving international consensus, than is possible through legislation’.22 However, there
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